


Spit Out What I Breathe

by lucymonster



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Erectile Dysfunction, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Sexual Abuse, Praise Kink, Redeemed Ben Solo, Self-Hatred, smothering
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-20 19:15:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17628080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: 'We slept together, Ben,' says Rey. 'Why are you avoiding me now?'Shame curdles in Ben's stomach. He can't tell her the truth.





	Spit Out What I Breathe

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Omnicat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omnicat/gifts).



‘Stop it. I can’t. It’s not, this isn’t – I can’t.’

Sick with shame and disappointment, Ben shoves Rey’s hand away and sits up in bed. He can’t do this. His limp, broken, _useless_ body won’t fucking let him. She was always going to find out sooner or later. But he’d hoped – he’d hoped so much that he could put it off a little longer than this.

Rey frowns, her soft lips curling into a hard line of displeasure. ‘Why not?’

‘What do you mean, why not?’

‘Well, you didn’t seem to have any problem last night.’

Last night was a mistake. There’d been laughter and music and Rey in that fucking beautiful dress, and the waiters had refilled Ben’s glass just enough times to soften the hardest edges of his better judgement. It hadn’t seemed to matter, last night, that he was still _him_ , still his damaged miserable self with a mind like a minefield and a face that makes small children cry. She’d looked at him and smiled and he’d wanted her too much to think straight. They’d fallen into bed – his bed, because at that stage he hadn’t had the foresight to plan for a graceful exit afterwards. She’d wrapped her legs around his waist and moaned his name over and over again, and he’d lost himself completely in the overwhelming bliss of it. For a wild, brief moment it had felt like somehow everything was going to be okay.

And now, morning. Now, reality.

‘I have to clean up,’ he says.

The ‘fresher lights aren’t kind to Ben’s face. Pallid skin. Dull, pouchy eyes. Hair hanging as limp as his worthless flaccid dick around mole-spattered cheeks and an overlong jaw. He splashes his skin, brushes his teeth, and wraps his naked body in a bathrobe to save Rey from having to look in any more detail at just what an awful mistake she’s made.

‘I had sex with Rey,’ he mouths at the mirror. It doesn’t make sense. ‘Rey had sex with _me_.’ No, that’s even worse.

 _Rey_ , offers a serpentine voice in the back of his mind, _took pity on your sad and obvious desperation. She swallowed her pride and gritted her teeth and let you rut the pathetic need out of your system. She already regrets it._

That sounds more like it.

 _Later_ , the voice adds helpfully, _she’ll laugh about it with all her Resistance friends. They already hate you – they're bound to enjoy the story._

Ben breaks eye contact with his reflection and flips the faucet on, filling the sink with warm water as he reaches for his razor just for the sake of something to do. He doesn’t want to go back out there yet. With a bit of luck, by the time he’s done, Rey will have gathered her clothes and booked a well-advised retreat.

He pumps some shaving foam into his hand. Lifts it towards his face, and then freezes as the door slides open with a quiet hydraulic hiss.

She’s still completely naked. ‘I kind of like the stubble,’ she tells him, breezing into his personal space like it’s nothing and pressing her body up against his back. Her skin is warm from bed, her breasts are soft against him, and despite himself Ben feels his cock twitch beneath the robe – too little, too late. Rey’s arms wrap around his middle and her face peers out from behind his shoulder.

The sight of their reflections side by side is almost unbearable. Hot shame and pitiful want churn in Ben’s stomach.

 _She’s too good for you_ , the voice croons. _This isn’t real_.

 _No,_ you’re _not real_ , Ben fires back in his head. Snoke is dead, the shrivelled halves of his body long since lost to the vastness of space. Gone are the days when he could reach inside Ben’s head – his body, his soul – on whatever cruel whim took him. Gone are the days of that painful, inescapable intimacy. But Ben (like all humans, Snoke might remind him, sneering) is a creature of habit. His brain has had no trouble filling in its new Snoke-shaped hole with hyper-realistic echoes of the bond they used to share.

‘You’re upset,’ says Rey.

‘I’m not upset.’

‘There’s no point lying to me. I can feel it in the Force when you lie.’

 _See?_ Snoke’s simulacrum says. _You are transparent, Kylo Ren, utterly transparent. You can’t deceive anyone. Your inadequacy is on display for the entire galaxy to –_

‘Shut _up_ ,’ Ben snaps.

Rey blinks. Stares at him in the mirror, and her wounded look quickly turns to spitfire indignation. ‘Well, excuse me for interrupting your morning routine,’ she snaps back, while Ben scrambles for a way to explain that he wasn’t talking to her without making himself sound completely insane. To explain that it’s not her, it’s him, that it’s not her fault he can’t even fucking get it up to compensate for the repulsive mess that is every single other thing about him.

The words, like his erection, fail to materialise.

And then it’s too late and Rey’s gone in a huff, pointedly closing the ‘fresher door behind her.

* * *

There are things Ben’s done that will cling to him forever, black and rancid like the mud from a bantha trough. He has sat through too many hearings to count, heard himself described in all kinds of ways: traitor, tyrant, collaborator. War criminal. The tabloids worked overtime to add their own creative flair to the general atmosphere of outrage when his pardon was announced. _Hosnian butcher walks scot free_ , they trumpeted, not knowing and – perhaps understandably – not caring that _free_ is an empty word when you’re living with this much blood on your hands.

He’s not rotting in a prison cell. For that, at least, he’s probably nowhere near as grateful as he should be.

He has poured out the details of his every last crime to a board of grim-faced military prosecutors while holoprojections of the wartorn aftermath played in the background.

He’s described weapons systems and military strategies and intelligence networks. He’s exposed mass graves and catalogued the atrocities that were once his job to keep off the public radar. For completion’s sake, he has confessed to acts of violence and terror that the prosecutors would never otherwise have found, hidden as they were in the wastelands of the Unknown Regions, out of sight and out of mind for the democratic galaxy.

He’s sat through conversations with his mother, through tears and grief and anger and blame stretched taut like sutures over the gaping wound in her maternal soul. He’s answered every question she asked, each one more uncomfortably probing than the last: what was he thinking? What was he feeling? What made him do it? Why didn’t he come home sooner?

In his hopeless quest for closure and a redemption he doesn’t deserve, Ben has given every part of himself that anyone’s ever asked for.

But there are things that no one asks for. Things he’ll carry in silence for the rest of his years. Beneath the weight of his festering confessional trash heap are a last few buried secrets: things he’s done, things he’s allowed to be done to him, that he’ll never tell anyone as long as he lives.

 _My good, loyal apprentice. My wonderful boy. There’s no need to hide your desires from me. I see all of you. I_ embrace _all of you._

Pleasure and pain. Shame and gratitude. Hatred and blind, hot, devoted love. The boy Ben Solo didn’t know any better. The man Kylo Ren didn’t want anything else. The hybrid wreck who’s left over today remembers it all in technicolour detail: how it felt to submit to those intimate touches, those tender punishments and violent rewards. How it felt to serve on his knees, to relax his jaw, relax his body, take every part of what was given to him. How it felt to be split in two and then stroked back together afterwards.

It always hurt. It always made him sick to his stomach. And he always came, shaking and whimpering and clinging to his master like a raft in churning rapids.

Even now, a part of him almost misses the simplicity. At least with Snoke, Ben never had any fucking trouble getting it up.

* * *

Rey’s in his bed again. Or on it, at least, sitting perched at the foot with her arms crossed and a look of pugnacious resolve on her face.

He’s been avoiding her for days, skirting her usual haunts around the Resistance base, staying out of her path, even rotating his mealtimes to make sure they don’t intersect with hers. But he never made a backup plan for what to do if she forced the issue. It never crossed his mind that she would.

‘Ben,’ he says, the moment he steps through the door to his quarters and spots the danger that’s lying in wait for him. ‘You’re ignoring me. Why have you been ignoring me?’

It’s not like he can just walk out of his own bedroom. ‘Hi, Rey,’ he says, and lets the door slide shut behind him.

‘Don’t you _hi, Rey_ me. We slept together, remember? I may not be the most cultured person in the galaxy, but I’m pretty sure there’s no society where it’s polite to sleep with someone and then refuse to speak to them afterwards.’

‘I–’ When she says it like that, it sounds kind of bad. He’d figured it was better for her sake if he saved her from coming face to face with the hideous reminder of her momentary lapse in judgement.

‘I know it’s not because you didn't enjoy it,’ Rey goes on, supremely self-assured. ‘I can tell that much even without the Force. But whatever it is, you’re completely closed off – like there’s something you’re hiding, and every time I try to look, I hit a brick wall.’

‘Please don’t try to look inside my mind,’ says Ben, as reasonably as he can. ‘You can just ask.’

‘Not when you’re avoiding me, I can’t.’ True. Fair. Part of the whole point of the exercise, if he’s honest with himself. ‘But anyway, I don't care. It's not my business if you want to keep secrets. You'll talk to me when you want to. Right?'

Ben has no idea how to reply to that. At this point, he’s pretty sure the only reason he’s not lost to the darkness in an off-world prison somewhere is because he lets the Resistance bleed him dry for information whenever they like. Never mind whether he'd prefer to keep it secret.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. Means it.

Rey shrugs, and a little of the aggressive tension bleeds out of her. ‘I don’t want you to be sorry, Ben. I just want to know where we stand. Because I really enjoyed the other night, and I think you did too, and I'm kind of hoping we can do it again. But I also know what you're like - don't give me that look, you know what I mean.'

He doesn't, and he thinks she's misread whatever  _look_ he's giving her. Ben's mind has come to a screeching halt on  _kind of hoping we can do it again_.

'But if it's not happening,', says Rey, 'I at least want to be able to pass you in a corridor without feeling like one of us has to hide.’

A new emotion peers out from behind the cloud: guilt. He’s been selfish, as usual. He really didn’t think that Rey would care if he avoided her. Why did he think that? What kind of asshole takes a woman to bed and then cuts her dead immediately afterwards?

 _You fool_ , says his subconscious in Snoke’s nastiest voice. _Even when you try to do the right thing, your very existence is a blight upon her. Accept it. You are nothing to these people, nothing that they wouldn’t be better off without._

The Snoke-voice is right, of course. It's always been right. But wallowing about it isn’t doing anyone any favours - certainly not Rey, as it turns out.

When at last Ben opens his mouth, his own voice cuts haltingly across the sinister background whisper of Snoke’s. ‘I don’t want you to hide,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to make anything awkward. I just thought it would be better if I stayed out of your way.’

‘Why?’

‘Because…’ How can he explain this? ‘It’s wrong, Rey. I’m wrong. I’m no good at … being close to people, taking care of them, whatever. I can’t give you what you need.’

A warning flashes in Rey’s eyes. ‘Who says I need you to take care of me? I can do that myself. I can do _all_ of it by myself, in a pinch. But it’s more fun with you.’

Ben grimaces. ‘Yeah, on that rare special occasion when I can actually get things working.’

‘Get what things working? What are you talking about?’ Rey’s eyes narrow, and then widen as they drift down towards his crotch. ‘Oh. Oh, for fuck’s sake, Ben. This is a performance issue, isn’t it? You’re upset because of what happened in the morning. Just because one time you couldn’t get it to–’

‘It’s not one time.’ He can feel the heat and shame flooding his face. ‘It’s, uh … pretty regular, actually. The night before was the one-off. Usually it’s a lot harder for me to get … you know.’

‘Hard?’

Ben closes his eyes and prays for the Force to swallow him whole.

‘I don’t care,’ says Rey. He opens his eyes, one and then the other, and she’s frowning at him but it’s not in anger. ‘Truly, I don’t care. Ben. After everything we’ve been through together, you think _that’s_ the big dealbreaker?’

Yes. No. It’s that exactly and so much more, his limp dick just one weak and disappointing symbol of everything that’s wrong with him as a person. Everything that makes him completely unworthy as a partner, completely unable to give Rey what she deserves.

‘I don’t know what I think,’ he says, so honestly that it makes him cringe. ‘I just … I hate being like this. I wish I could be better for you.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I’m a fucking mess, Rey.’

Rey snorts. ‘Well,’ she says with something that sounds very much like mirth, ‘everyone knows that.’

And then she steps forward and loops her arms around Ben’s neck.

Her mouth tastes of fresh mint – she planned this, Ben realises, and he can smell body lotion and a hint of some kind of spicy perfume that she’s managed to scrounge from who knows where. An image flashes into his mind of her in the shower, scrubbing and scenting and polishing her body all over just so she can come over here and entice him into bed. Him. Really? His clothes, which were serviceably clean five minutes ago, feel suddenly dishevelled and stale after a long day’s wear with no thought for how he’d look at the end.

Rey’s hands twine in his hair to angle his head down, and he sinks into the kiss with thoughtless greed that pours in over the top of his shame. Her mouth is hot on his, lips plump and pillowy soft. Her tongue nudges past his teeth and he thinks he’s going to drown in her.

He doesn’t drown. He falls instead, falls backwards onto the bed with her weight following on top of him. She straddles his lap, bites his lip, tugs loose his belt and opens his tunic and maps his chest with eager hands. With their bodies pressed together Ben can feel the fear of failure creeping up on him again, a self-fulfilling prophecy that sets the blood pounding in all of his veins except the ones that want it most.

But Rey doesn’t seem concerned. She’s done with his tunic and is now taking off her own. The fabric falls away to expose her breasts, loose beneath the garment, full and pert with dusky nipples already hardened into inviting little nubs. He cups them, squeezing gently, and she arches her back and voices her approval in a happy little moan.

She’s enjoying this. Enjoying _him_. She’s come closer than anyone alive in the world to learning the full disgraceful truth about him, and somehow, impossibly, she still wants him.

Ben could cry. He could cry, but her warmth and acceptance are spilling over into him, a soothing light in the Force that keeps the shadows at bay.

‘Let me get these off,’ she says, hooking a thumb in the waistband of her breeches, and Ben’s throb of desire is cut through with something close to panic. She’s not trying to take his pants off yet. Just wriggling out of her own, unfazed by the awkwardness of the movement, unwilling to clamber off him and get the job done more efficiently. She hovers above him on her knees once she’s done, and he gazes up at the whole of her exquisitely naked body and thinks, _This can’t be real_.

It just can’t be.

But it is.

And if there’s still one stubborn part of his body that hasn’t got the memo about what they’re doing, who cares? There’s no malice written anywhere on Rey, no cruelty, no judgement. Instead of nudging her down his body towards disappointment, he wraps his hands behind her thighs and urges her forward so she’s positioned right above his head. He can tell when the suggestion hits its mark because her lips part and her eyes take on a sultry gleam. He wants so badly to please her. To hear her moan his name again like she did the other night.

She doesn’t hesitate at all to sink her weight onto his face. Hesitation has never been her style. Her scent is musky and sweet, and the sound from her lips is raw with want when he rolls his tongue against her clit.

‘I’ve been thinking about you all week,’ she says, as she grinds on his mouth. Ben can only half-hear her. Her thighs are planted either side of his ears and the whole world is muffled, reduced to nothing but the hot-wet-slick of her body above and around and on top of him. ‘I can’t believe you made me wait this long. You’re a bad man, Ben Solo.’ The reprimand is playful, good-natured, without a hint of the punishing intent that long experience has taught him to expect.

He can’t reply with his mouth full of her cunt, so he settles for working his tongue between her folds until he finds her entrance and feels her squirm.

‘That feels good,’ Rey gasps, tilting her hips a little more. Her weight bears down on him, threatening to cut off his oxygen supply but it doesn’t matter, none of it matters as long as she keeps making those sounds. ‘You’re going to make it up to me now, aren’t you? That’s it. So good. You’re so good for me, Ben.’

He wants to be good for her. He wants it so bad it fucking hurts, and that’s not just the urgent burn of his lungs talking.

She rides his face like her life depends on it, gripping his hair, gripping the pillow beneath his head, little gasps and groans filtering through to his ears past the muffling vice of her thighs around his head. His chin and lips are slick with her arousal. Her scent is everywhere. Her rhythm starts slow and picks up aggression until he’s snatching tiny, precious wisps of air through his nose in between each roll of her hips. She’s going to smother him and he doesn’t want her ever to stop. There’s a kind of euphoria in this, as the harsh light of the world darkens around the edges of his eyes and his lungs burn and his jaw hurts and Rey –

Rey comes with a throaty cry, pulling on his hair and rocking erratically as the shudders run through her.

As she collapses off to the side, a laugh bubbles from her lips. Ben’s stomach clenches, but there’s nothing mocking about the laugh – she’s just happy, catching her breath between satisfied giggles and smiling from ear to ear as she nestles in beside him. ‘Oh, that was good. You’re really good at this.’

She’s _happy_.

Something terrible is happening. Something old and familiar and a million times more humiliating than not being able to get it up. Ben can feel it welling in his throat, the choking hot ache of a sob about to spill, and he’s never been any good at suppressing this, never been any good at hiding his pathetic feelings and involuntary responses. This is the part where Snoke hardens his gaze and says, _Pitiful child. Imagine if anyone saw you in this state. The great Kylo Ren, scourge of the Jedi, weeping like a brat into his master’s lap._

This is the part where he should run. Run and hide, because it’s happening again and she’s going to _see_ and he’s so exposed, so helpless in his need and dread.

Rey’s hand comes to rest on his hip, stroking gentle circles on tender skin. ‘Look at you,’ she says, and her voice is soft and full of husky warmth. ‘Do I taste that good, really? I haven’t even touched you and you’re already overwhelmed.’

She’s still happy. Ben’s head is a mess of panicked self-loathing but from Rey there’s nothing – no judgement, no intent to hurt. Smugness, definitely. A little spark of mischief that glints through the dark haze of his shame in the Force. ‘Oh, Ben, I’m not done with you yet. Not after how fast you ran away last time. What if this is my only chance to do everything I want to do to you?’

Her hand is travelling. She trails her fingers down his inner thigh, back up the crease of his groin, and the sob trapped in Ben’s throat is joined by a moan that crowds the constricted space until it’s inevitable that _some_ kind of noise leaks. It’s shapeless, indeterminate. An ugly kind of whimper that inexplicably makes Rey’s smile widen even further.

‘I love seeing you like this,’ she says. ‘All soft and open and vulnerable. It suits you.’ Her hand slips lower, reaching between his legs to cup his balls with a feather-light touch and oh – oh. He’s hard. He forgot to even worry about it and now, somehow, he’s hard. ‘You don’t have to be ashamed with me, Ben. You don’t have to try and hide anything. You’re gorgeous like this. You have no idea how gorgeous you are, do you? No one’s ever told you.’

She knows. The certainty hits Ben like a punch to the gut, and of course she fucking knows – she can see him in the Force just like he can see her. She can feel what he feels, can feel every bit of damage and shame that’s been churning inside him this whole time and yet somehow she’s not running. She _knows_ , and instead of using the knowledge to hurt him, she’s–

‘I think,’ says Rey, ‘there’s nothing wrong with you. Nothing broken. You just need a little encouragement, that’s all.’

She’s wrapping her hand around the erection he forgot to anguish over. Stroking, smiling, teasing out the pressure in his balls and the sweet spot beneath the head that makes his eyes scrunch closed and his breathing hitch.

‘You deserve encouragement,’ she says. ‘You deserve to have someone take care of you. Let me take care of you, Ben.’

She’s crawling up on all fours above him and kissing her way down his body, and he’s arching into her and fisting his hands in the bedsheets and making more of those piteous little sounds that he just doesn’t have it in him to hold back any longer. The panic has melted into something else entirely. Something he couldn’t switch off if he tried.

‘You’re being so good for me,’ Rey murmurs against the skin of his stomach. ‘You’re so lovely like this. Just relax. Let go for me. I want to feel you let go.’

She’s taking his cock in her mouth, swallowing him deep with the same unhesitating confidence she shows in anything she ever does. It’s too much. Adrenaline and whirlwind emotion has him on a knife’s edge, shaking underneath her touch, ready to spill over at any second.

Rey moans around him. Her mouth’s too full to form words but he can hear them anyway, the praise and the encouragement like a warm, caressing touch in the Force.

He doesn’t last long, but she doesn’t seem to expect him to, and the last thing he registers before he falls apart is her satisfied hum as she takes him in all the way to the hilt. It feels incredible. Everything feels incredible. He comes hard, convulsing and incoherent with pleasure, drunk on the wordless realisation that, after all, it’s safe to let go. It’s what she wants. It’s all he needs. It’s all his shattered mind can process.

'That's it,' Rey says, pulling off him and tenderly kissing the tip of his cock. 'Just like that. Let's not hide from each other any more, okay?'

He cries himself hoarse afterwards, wet-faced and wild-haired and curled against Rey with his face buried wetly in the crook of her neck. Her much smaller frame encloses his, sheltering him, holding him close and stroking his hair until the pressure slows to a trickle and all that’s left is floating, empty relief.

* * *

Sometime later, he wakes. Rey’s arms are still around him and the room is filled with echoing whispers.

 _Weak_ , says Snoke’s voice. _Weak, pathetic, needy creature. All your life you’ve relied on the strength of others to keep you afloat, dragging them under while you scramble for air like a craven –_

Rey shifts a little in her sleep and takes a snuffling little breath. In the dim light of the bedside chrono, Ben can see a soft upward curl to her lips as she sleeps a deep and happy sleep with her sated body pressed against him.

The voice trails off.

 


End file.
